G-COPSS: A content centric communication infrastructure for gaming applications

With users increasingly focused on an online world, an emerging challenge for the network infrastructure is the need to support Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). This is an application domain that is attracting more players than ever before, very often with players distributed over a metropolitan area. Currently, MMORPG are built on an IP infrastructure with the primary responsibility on servers to do the work of disseminating control messages and having to predict/retrieve objects in each player's view. Limited server resources significantly impair the user's interactive experience. Modern fast-paced action games that run on a client/server architecture limit the number of players who can interact simultaneously since the server needs to handle the frequent updates and disseminate them. Scale and timeliness are major challenges of such a server-oriented gaming architecture. We propose Gaming over COPSS (G-COPSS), a communication infrastructure using a Content-Oriented Pub/Sub System (COPSS) to enable efficient decentralized information dissemination in MMORPG, exploiting the network and the end-systems for player management and information dissemination. We emulate an application that is particularly emblematic of MMORPG - Counter-Strike - but one in which all the players share a hierarchical structured map. Using trace-driven simulation, we demonstrate that G-COPSS can achieve high scalability and tight timeliness requirements of MMORPG. The simulator is parameterized using the results of careful microbenchmarking of the open-source CCN implementation and of standard IP-based forwarding. Our evaluations show that G-COPSS provides considerable performance improvement in terms of aggregate network load and update latency compared to that of a traditional IP server-based infrastructure.